There are two things the American film industry should avoid at all costs. One is letting an ambitious actor convert one of his or her favorite novels into a feature film. Two is never greenlight a sci-fi film starring John Travolta. To wit, we present the disaster that is Battlefield Earth.

A science-fiction opus starring the Barbarino of the Actors Guild, Battlefield Earth should be shown only at maximum-security prisons when a prisoner is tossed in solitary for bad behavior. Sci-fi is always a tricky beast: Tight script, a good director, an ensemble cast of decent actors, and the ability to suspend even the most difficult of disbeliefs. Battlefield Earth fails at achieving even one of these attributes.

There's nothing like a good Amish movie. But throw in a bowling movie as well, and you've got yourself, well, something pretty asinine, but something pretty damn funny, too. Harrelson is a once-great bowler, now washed-up on account of losing his hand. Quaid is his Amish protege, and together they attack the pro circuit, along with vixen Angel, who doesn't seem to have been vaulted into starletdom the way she meet have hoped. Bonus points for Murray's (the arch-rival) god-awful hairdos, plus check out the DVD for added footage.

If 1950s sci-fi schlockmeister Ed Wood could have gotten his hands on $60 million and CGI special effects, he might have made a movie as hilariously gawdawful as "Battlefield Earth."

Seriously on par with Wood's infamous "Plan 9 from Outer Space" as one of the worst motion picture in science fiction history, this bloated, brain-dead, narcissistic, almost completely nonsensical cinematic disaster is likely to make anyone with any kind of summer movie standards long for the return of movie-mocking Comedy Central series "Mystery Science Theater 3000."

A man-vs.-monster parable about an enslaved human race rebelling against their alien masters a millennium after being nuked back to the Stone Age, almost every scene features such bad writing, bad acting and absurdly implausible circumstances that it just begs to be viciously ripped apart.